atSpoke (discontinued) vs. BMC Helix Remedyforce

Spoke is well suited to ingesting the myriad questions and requests I get throughout my workday. If I receive requests directly, they make it easy to change those requests into tickets, which helps my team track and demonstrate the work that we do. Spoke is also great for auto-answering common issues and questions. It only takes three of the same general question for it to start recognizing and offering the answer from our KB. Spoke has also been a great partner in helping our team be more efficient and more effective, something we never got with our old provider. I can’t emphasize enough that Spoke is NOT for external-facing helpdesks. It’s just not. It works best for teams that are supporting their own colleagues. I would also say that, at the moment, it doesn’t scale well past a few hundred users. They’re implementing features this year that will be more helpful for that sort of thing. But it does work great for remote support!

Incentivized

[BMC Helix Remedyforce] is probably best suited for an MSP who needs to keep multiple clients separated. If you were an internal IT department I think the additional features it has would be lost. When dealing with an MSP who needs to know what software and what issues have effected specific clients it is very well suited to do that.

Incentivized

• Routes questions to the right team or person via Slack, email or text
• Obtain status updates on current job requests
• Allows IT to follow up more efficiently on the job requests from employees

Incentivized

• An admin user is able to quickly create a request definition with all of its components from one screen. We use to have to go to the 7 or 8 different screens to create each piece of the request definition.
• Ability to update multiple Incidents/Service Requests at once with the update button. This allows essentially an inline edit functionality within Remedyforce.
• Change management schedule is a great feature as well to be able to see how changes align and what there expected start dates/times are.

• Newer company, a lot of features on the road map that aren't yet available.
• A few bugs with the Slack integration.
• Filtering/searching tickets is not intuitive.

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor/regulate the volume of tickets when you integrate with your monitoring software. We have so many items that trigger alerts, creating a ticket for each is somewhat overwhelming. Would like to be able to better control when an incident should be created.
• Being able to report on Service requests and tasks together would be nice. Right now I have to do it separately as they are in different buckets, so to speak.
• Remedy console is an improvement from where it started but can still be a cleaner interface for a tech to be able to work out of for their day to day work.

The total amount of time spent from installation to configuration for a minimal ticketing system was 2 hours. Maintenance and customization for the application can be completed with a great amount of ease. In addition having a customer portal is an added benefit that pays for itself

Incentivized

Any questions we've had were fielded in a very timely manner and their staff have been very helpful in our launch and ongoing inquiries. Internally, it has been very well received amongst staff and has increased efficiency, company wide

Incentivized

They care about your success.

Incentivized

Learning industry best practices or gaining insight on them from either BMC or an implementation partner would have saved some headaches we faced after roll-out.

Incentivized

Spoke is just... easier. Easier to set up and easier to use, for both admins and users. We already have asset management and didn’t necessarily need our ticketing system to be directly connected to it. We wanted a product that was friendly to use, not crazy expensive, and didn’t require us to purchase an implementation package and/or a multi-day training package to roll-out. It’s not rocket science!

Incentivized

I previously worked with tools like Service Manager which were difficult to configure, administer and maintain. The support options were very limited. Remedyforce has local US support, dedicated reps, and a more developed infrastructure to work from to support an organization. This runs on the Salesforce platform so worrying about server failures and unscheduled outages was no longer going to be an issue for us. Self service, knowledge base, and change control were just a few highly utilized features that helped employees support themselves and automate very manual processes.

• Spoke has been very cost efficient, more than paying for itself in gained productivity hours.

Incentivized

• Remedyforce has allowed us to eliminate other solutions that provided similar features. By now using one true ITSM we have been able to save money which in higher education is always a concern.
• The reports and dashboards allow for a birds-eye view of our daily operations and provide managers and executives the information they need to make important cost saving decisions.